“The first “Alien” film was the main point of reference, it was what we wanted to honour,” says Simon Ridge, the animator responsible for how the Alien moved. “There’s not much of the actual alien itself on screen, so it was about extracting the feeling you had when it was on screen, which was that it was quite odd. Quite eerie.
“I started looking around at different things that tapped into that very feeling of being eerie and odd. I looked at Nosferatu, the original old school Dracula. We looked at dinosaurs as well, looking at how the feet like went on the ground. I remember making quite an effort to make the feet feel really graceful. And then with the alien’s ability to go very, very fast at the same time, I thought that would play into these odd contrasts. It was creating a mixture of all sorts and then hoping that amalgamation would create that weirdness, that oddness.”
New Generation of Fans
Animation was just one ingredient in the dynamic cocktail of fear that Creative Assembly mixed together. They created a dynamic and reactive audio system because unlike most survival horror games, Alien: Isolation wasn’t choreographed or scripted. They replicated the Lo-Fi-Sci-Fi art direction that defined the movies, from the monitors with chunky buttons to the dirt and grime that caked the metallic walls.
